Posts Tagged ‘Skokie’

An 88-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz death camp has donated a new Torah scroll to the Lubavitch Chabad of Skokie, near Chicago, the ultimate revenge against the Nazis who tried to eradicate Jews and Judaism.

Her other revenge was to dwell in the future and present, instead of the past, and marry and bring more Jews into the world.

Marge Fettmen, her children and grandchildren attended a recent Torah dedication ceremony, in memory of her late husband Daniel, also a Holocaust survivor.

Fettman, known by the Nazis as prisoner No. 21880, told the Chabad website, “God gave me a good idea – to have a Torah written. It is our guide. I want the Torah to be used to teach people about Judaism.”

Fettman was living with her family in Romania in 1944 when the Nazis stormed into their town of Szaszregen and herded her and her relatives into a cattle car for Auschwitz.

“When we arrived, Dr. [Josef] Mengele stood there flicking his whip, sending some of us to the right and others to the left. I was separated from my family,” she told Chabad. “Since I had the snacks we had packed for the children, I was concerned that they would be hungry. I wanted to bolt to the other side to be with them, but Mengele saw and shouted at me in German, ‘Are you a fool?’ I stayed where I was, and my life was spared.”

After surviving the death camp, she married her husband, and the couple moved to the United States in 1949, where they raised they raised their children in the Jewish tradition. Her husband, a grocery store owner, died in 2004 at the age of 83.

Her parents were very religious, and she decided that dedicating a new Torah scroll was the best way to remember them forever.

The Brothers Ken and Daniel Hechtman, owners of the kosher Ken’s Diner in Skokie, Illinois, helped save several people from a fiery wreck in suburban Chicago.

Illinois State Police said the accident happened around 9:10 p.m., when a truck going north near Northbrook hit a car when merging from the right into a center lane. The truck then veered sharply to the right, striking a second car before losing control and smashing into a wall on the left shoulder of the highway.

Without thinking, Ken Hechtman, 60, who was driving a short distance behind, stopped his car and the two brothers ran to opposite ends of the truck. They said they felt the intense heat and saw the dark smoke turning thicker. They also heard the truck explode twice, Ken Hechtman said in an interview.

Daniel Hechtman, 54, ran toward the front of the semi and helped pull a passenger out of the fiery compartment. He carried the passenger’s limp body to the side of the road. The man started shaking, as if he was having spasms, Daniel Hechtman said.

Meanwhile, the elder Hechtman ran to the back of the truck, to stop the oncoming traffic. That’s when he heard voices calling for help from underneath the truck.

He saw a car stuck there, with a woman and young girl lying next to the vehicle. The woman’s hair and the girl’s back were on fire, Ken Hechtman said.

He managed to grab the two away, he said. He actually carried the little girl across the expressway as cars whizzed by.

“I heard the screaming and there was nothing else in my mind (but) to run toward the voices,” Ken Hechtman told the Chicago Tribune. “There was no time to think. It’s adrenaline. It’s all adrenaline.”

Ken Hechtman said he doesn’t consider himself a hero and that everything happened so fast, his reactions were automatic. Sounds heroic to me

“Everyone keeps talking about ‘Hero, hero, hero,’” he told the Tribune. “Now that I think about it, it was stupid. Who runs toward a flaming truck that’s exploding?”

Content from Chicago tribune, chicagoareafire.com and JTA was used in this report.